The Castle

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned. Fortunately, his request was ignored, allowing such works as The Trial to earn recognition among the literary masterpieces of the 20th century. This brilliant new translation of The Castle captures comedic elements and visual imagery that earlier interpretations missed.

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The Trial

If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

In the bizarre world of Franz Kafka, salesmen turn into giant bugs, apes give lectures at college academies, and nightmares probe the mysteries of modern humanity’s unhappiness. More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity.

Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text

A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.

The Trial

One of the great works of the 20th century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure.

Humboldt's Gift

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

The Trial [Naxos AudioBooks]

The Trial is one of the great works of the 20th century - an extraordinary vision of one man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge. Kafka evokes all the terrifying reality of his ordeal.

Gravity's Rainbow

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

Dubliners (Naxos Edition)

James Joyce's Dubliners is a collection of short stories about the lives of the people of Dublin around the turn of the century. Each story describes a small but significant moment of crisis or revelation in the life of a particular Dubliner, sympathetically but always with stark honesty. Many of the characters are desperate to escape the confines of their humdrum lives, though those that have the opportunity to do so seem unable to take it.

JR

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The Twelve Caesars

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Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

This groundbreaking audiobook by Michel Foucault, the most influential philosopher since Sartre, compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as Foucault examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, he suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to his soul-and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Devils

Exiled to four years in Siberia, but hailed by the end of his life as a saint, prophet, and genius, Fyodor Dostoevsky holds an exalted place among the best of the great Russian authors. One of Dostoevsky’s five major novels, Devils follows the travails of a small provincial town beset by a band of modish radicals - and in so doing presents a devastating depiction of life and politics in late 19th-century Imperial Russia.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman

Sixteenth-century Spanish gentleman Don Quixote, fed by his own delusional fantasies, takes to the road in search of chivalrous adventures. But his quest leads to more trouble than triumph. At once humorous, romantic, and sad, Don Quixote is a literary landmark. This fresh edition, by award-winning translator Edith Grossman, brings the tale to life as never before.

Molloy

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Malone Dies

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The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music

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Hunger: A Novel

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Crime and Punishment (Recorded Books Edition)

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Baudolino

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East.

Kafka on the Shore

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

Publisher's Summary

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned. Fortunately, his request was ignored, allowing such works as The Trial to earn recognition among the literary masterpieces of the 20th century. This brilliant new translation of The Castle captures comedic elements and visual imagery that earlier interpretations missed. A traveler known only as K. is promised a job as land-surveyor by officials of the Castle. But when K. arrives in town to claim his position, he learns that owing to a clerical error, his services aren't needed after all. Seeking an explanation, K. endures increasingly frustrating setbacks as he strives in vain to simply make contact with someone, anyone, from the Castle. Saturated with absurdist humor, this haunting novel has fascinated and puzzled readers throughout the world. Some critics praise it as the century's great religious parable, while others interpret it as indisputably antireligious. Critically acclaimed narrator George Guidall sheds light on this dreamlike tale, illuminating the limitless nuances of Kafka's writing.

I'm a Kafka fan, and I read The Castle before hearing the audiobook. This is definitely not for everyone -- long, rambling, seemingly without direction. Many of the passages feel more like a philosophy treatise than a story. It is an unfinished novel, literally ending in the middle of a scene, which leaves one very unsatisfied.

The narration is excellent, although a Kafka novel isn't something you can breeze through -- there are times when you need to stop and let a particular sentence sink in. In many ways I preferred to read the actual book, and take my time with it. This is a book that makes you work -- there are more questions than answers, and no real solutions. Like trudging through snow, it can be both wearying and exhilarating (not to mention deep.)

Before he died, Kafka told his friends how he intended The Castle to end, and that information would have been very helpful to include here. I also recommend The Trial as a much more accessible Kafka novel, which deals with many of the same themes (the individual struggle against a frustrating and obscure bureaucracy).

Listening to the book really brought back memories of 2 years that I lived in Germany. Essentially the book is about people who are quite intelligent when it comes to rationalizing, reasoning, and engineering, but the same people lack willpower, ummph or maybe just fortitude to go outside of the narrow parameters of the rulebooks and beaurocracies that keep them imprisoned. And the culture disdains anyone who undermines the rules and abhores anyone who does not properly respect the strict rules of the culture. The people have no capability to think outside of the box and adapt. Kafka's message was clear, I believe he wrote the book in the 1920's before the German's freely elected Adolf Hitler. If you want a glimpse into the muddled affairs of the still prevalent German political structure, listen to this book.

This is simply amazing. I couldn't wait to get back to it in my 4 hour drives. Couldn't wait! The one thing that may help one get it is that the norman bates-like voice of the landlady and other female parts is in fact exactly faithful to the text. I couldn't recommend this more highly and I commend the reader and producers!!!

This book is a classic, for good reason. It is classic Kafka, with the whole mystic, conspiracy, "what the f''' is going on?" kind of thing that make us love his work. I think parts of it is actually better than the trial, but in the last third of it, there are so many endless monologues and discriptions of how impossible the system and everybody is. It really seems that Kafka is going crazy and paranoid where he sits in his loft writing. And off course, it is not finished, which is one of the things this book is really famous for. The way this book ends is really cool.
Of all the audio-books I have listened to, this one is probably the one of which I still have the most and best mental pictures, and I read it 6 months ago.
The narrator is great, sometimes he talks a bit too fast, but reading Kafka out loud is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world (alongside mr. Obama's), and this considering, he does a perfect job. His voice is also incredible to the atmosphere of the book.

Sometimes you have to be in the right mood to appreciate the classics. When compared to Kafka's other stories, The Castle is sort of a positive-thinking story of the hero's encounter with the mysterious bureaucracy (which surrounds all of us). I had read it before and enjoyed it, but this time I found it rolling-in-the-aisles funny. If you think about it, how certain are you about the structure of the world that surrounds you? Who really controls it, if anyone? Kafka is one of the highest of the high authors, and this is one of his best books.

The reader is too impulsive, too emphatic, too weirdly singsong for this book. All the narration and conversations come out very energetic. It's like listening to a Frenchman speaking English with constant high nasal ending to every sentence. Hard to concentrate on the text.

For example, where K. has a few words with the landlord after refusing to be examined by Momus, the two, K. and the landlord, go at it quite heatedly, when the context suggests that neither had any strong interest in the other and was just bantering.

But this is much better than, at least, the other reading by Jeffrey Howard, who screeches away even more badly.

Both readings are of the new translation, which is not as good as the first translation by Edwin Muir.

I have listened to many, many audio books, and this one is the most disappointing.

I picked it up based on a number of the reviews chiming that it was humorous and gripping. How far from the truth that was.

I listened to the first part and thought that it must get better in the second part. Again, I was wrong. Hour after hour, I thought about stopping and listen to something that had some form of plot, but I figured the closer I got, I would sure miss something and regret it later.

Once it ended, I felt totally ripped off. It didn't really end with any sort of conclusion, it just ended as if it was mid sentence.

This is the most frustrating book I have ever listened to. I got the audio version because I really like this narrator. In the end, I just let the beautiful tones of the voice and words wash over me. Very tangled and strange story. Beautifully read though. Horrible end to an excrutiating and baffling story. I think Kafka is making a good point but causes the reader much suffering in so doing. Like walking in marshmallow.

If you're like me, then you'll be tortured with all the pointless, random, incoherent, and sometimes enjoyable, bits of unfinished madness which makes up this work... It was a weird experience... Something to be endured!

1 of 4 people found this review helpful

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